The specs and hardware of Sony Xperia SP reveal it is smaller but faster in performance than its fellow Android mid-range smartphone from the same label, Sony Xperia C. Both handsets have many similar features that they give their buyers a difficult time in choosing which smartphone to pick for their own.

Xperia SP debuted to conquer the mid-range sphere with loads of technology from its bigger brother Xperia Z, but with a price tag friendly to the budget-conscious buyers. Shortly following Xperia SP with its own set of specs and features to bet, was Xperia C.

Pica8 kicked off a busy week in the increasingly competitive software-defined networking space, making moves that officials say will help fuel the adoption of Linux-based OSes on bare-metal switches.

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ONIE has been accepted by the Open Compute Project, and enables businesses to run a range of operating systems—such as Pica8's PicOS or Cumulus Networks' operating system—on the same switch hardware. Vendors like Pica8 and Cumulus Networks are championing the use of standards-based operating systems running on low-cost bare-metal switches as an alternative in the software-defined network (SDN) space to more expensive and complex hardware from the likes of Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks.

Have you ever written a paper so long that you thought you would never see the end of it? If so, you know that the worst part is not dedicating hours on it, but rather that once you are done, you still have to order and format your references into a structured convention-following bibliography. Hopefully for you, Linux has the solution: bibliography/reference management tools. Using the power of BibTex, these programs can help you import your citation sources, and spit out a structured bibliography. Here is a non-exhaustive list of open-source reference management software on Linux.

Samuel Pitoiset has been working hard to reverse-engineer NVIDIA's hardware performance counters of their GPU and to allow them to be taken to their full potential under the open-source Nouveau Linux graphics driver.

For over one year the student developer Samuel Pitoiset has tasked himself with reverse engineering NVIDIA's GPU performance counters with an end goal of coming up with an NVPerfKit-like implementation for Linux that runs off the reverse-engineered Nouveau stack. Samuel has been involved with Google's Summer of Code and has stuck around doing great work for the limited-staffed Nouveau driver.

This pvSCSI support with the scsifront and scsiback modules is based on the original pvSCSI code written by Fujitsu during the Linux 2.6 days. Other Xen changes for Linux 3.18 include an attempt to keep memory contiguous during PV memory setup, allowing front/back drivers to use threaded IRqs, support for large initial RAM disk images (initrd) from PV guests, and fixes for PVH guests with the upcoming Xen 4.5.

As anticipated, Andy Ritger of NVIDIA presented at XDC2014 in Bordeaux, France the company's plans to support alternative window managers beyond X11 when it comes to their Linux graphics driver. NVIDIA is working on some significant improvements to their closed-source Linux driver to support Mir and Wayland.

Thunderbird is the powerful email client from Mozilla, with support for POP3 for keeping email locally and IMAP for remote storage. In addition, it features chat support, feeds reader and newsgroups. The interface is similar to the one of the newer versions of Firefox.

The US Air Force has the drones, but now the US Navy has autonomous boats that can steer themselves, patrol a zone, and take a hostile posture, whatever that means. It was just a matter of time until someone thought of having some kind of drones that could guard a fleet on the water. The US Navy was happy to oblige.

While Munich city council's decision to replace Microsoft software with open-source alternatives made headlines, it is one of a number of municipalities across Germany to make such a move.

Across Germany at the national and local level authorities are running Linux and open-source software. The German federal employment office has migrated 13,000 public workstations from Windows NT to OpenSuse, and a number of German ubran areas are using or in the process of switching to open-source software on the desktop, including Isernhagen, Leipzig, Schwäbisch Hall and Treuchtlingen.

Currently, dependencies and applications are installed into directories in /opt, and Listaller contains some logic to make applications find dependencies, and to talk to the package manager to install missing things. This has some drawbacks, like the need to install an application before using it, the need for applications to be relocatable, and application-installations being non-atomic.

LG releases webOS Open Source Edition, looks to expand webOS usage

LG’s smart TVs ship with an operating system called webOS, which is the latest version of an operating system that was developed by Palm to run on phones, acquired by HP to use with tablets, and eventually sold to LG, which is still using it today.
But now LG wants to expand the adoption of webOS and the company is working with the South Korean government to solicit business proposals from other companies interested in using webOS.
LG has also released a webOS Open Source Edition version of the operating system.

Test driving 4 open source music players and more

In my last article, I described my latest music problem: I need an additional stage of amplification to make proper use of my new phono cartridge. While my pre-amplifier contains a phono stage, its gain is only suitable for cartridges that output about 5mV, whereas my new cartridge has a nominal output of 0.4mV.
Based on my investigation, I liked the looks of the Muffsy phono kits, so I ordered the head amplifier, the power supply, and the back panel. I also needed to obtain a case to hold the boards and the back panel, available online from many vendors. Muffsy does not sell the “wall wart” necessary to power the unit, so I ordered one of those from a supplier in California. Finally, inspecting my soldering iron, solder “sucker,” and solder, I’ve realized I need to do better—so a bit more shopping, online or local, is in order there. Finally, for those, like me, whose soldering skills may be rusty and perhaps were not all that great to begin with, Muffsy kindly offers links to two instructional videos.